Stanislav Petrov

The only reason you are alive and reading this is because Petrov understood that the systems he observed were capable of error. He was suspicious of what he was seeing reported, and chose not to escalate

The story of Stanislav Petrov and how he (quite literally) saved life as we know it seemed implausible to me when I first heard it. These days, well…

This piece has an important warning about the nature of non/deterministic systems. It’s not like we’re putting a stochastic parrot in charge of our nukes or anything, right?

Against Access

I first came across this piece a few years ago. It forced me to completely rethink the purpose of accessibility accommodations, especially in the form of image alt text. The topic surfaced again this week and I was reminded of this piece:

An ASL interpreter would never have done that, unless they allowed their instincts to overrule their training.

When I teach ASL interpreters that they must share their opinions and assessments, they always protest, “But I don’t want to influence the DeafBlind person!”

“If you’re worried about influencing us,” I reply, “you give yourself too much credit and us too little.”

I will also suggest watching some videos about ProTactile, especially the official introduction. As you watch this, pay attention to your own reactions; especially any discomfort you might feel about how these interactions work.

Your personal brand makes me want to vomit

Amen, and Annie Blog has earned a place in my feed reader.

Prompts already won

A great tour of text-centric interface design trends and where they might lead.

The implication, of course, is that the novice is doing something inferior, and if only they’d take the time to learn a better way, they’d be much more productive and efficient.

The only problem is that the assumptions are completely false.

I don’t necessarily agree with many of the points in this piece, but I’ve been playing around with the idea of text-as-interface in a query library I’ve extracted from my work, where the yaml + text-like statements are more efficient and easier to work with than the kinds of graphical interfaces for such things I’ve implemented many times over.

Comprehensive keyboard handling in terminals

Speaking of text-based interfaces, I learned this week about the Kitty keyboard protocol, which overcomes many limitations of keycodes with terminal emulators, including the ability to use the Cmd/GUI/Super modifier key.

It’s implemented by many terminal emulators including my preferred WezTerm, the fish shell, and many terminal programs including vim, neovim, helix (which I’ve been playing around with lately), and yazi.

It opens up some real possibilities for terminal-based programs and workflows.